The nation's liberated economy -- portrayed by globalization forces as an antidote to poverty -- has done little for nearly 300 million poor people, the most of any country
New Delhi -- Among India's poor, survival is still won by acts of despair and cunning. It's a daily quest whose reward is a plate of rice or a simple medication.
Farmers in Maharasthra hang banners offering their kidneys for sale; overworked medics in Gorakhpur fashion tubes from paper to deliver oxygen to the diseased; hungry parents in the barren fields of Orissa sell their children for the price of a bag of grain.
Millions roam the country in pursuit of work, trading the want of the village for the indignity of bonded labor. At outdoor kilns dotting the scorched terrain of Andhra Pradesh, parents and children toil side by side mixing and molding bricks from dawn till midnight. By doing this, a family of six earns about $5.50 per week, enough for one evening meal of unripe tomatoes and broken rice, reject kernels used normally as chicken feed.
The workers bathe in the stagnant mud pits used to mix the bricks and sleep in mattress-size hovels no taller than a man's belly button, which contain their entire estate: some tattered clothes, a hand broom, a few dinged-up pots.
"We were born in the mud, we've spent our lives in the mud, and we'll die in the mud," says Bansi Dhar Bag, 43, his skin blackened by a lifetime of kiln work. "We have to lead our lives like this. We suffer a lot, but we have to survive. We have to suffer."
Such is the burden of poverty for more than a quarter of India's 1.1 billion people. It's the nation with the largest number of poor people in the world.
Although their ragged slums cram the roadsides and river banks of capital New Delhi, they almost certainly did not cross the gaze of President Bush, who arrived here Wednesday for a two-day visit during his first trip to India.
India has sought to portray a very different image to the outside world, one of a global leader. In conjunction with Bush's trip, the United States gave a nod of approval to that aim, inking a nuclear energy agreement that effectively normalizes India's furtive nuclear status. Many feel that a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council is inevitable.
India's rise to prominence began with domestic market reforms in 1991 that broke the dam of globalization and sent the country's economy soaring -- growing at an average of 6.8 percent since 1994. In just a decade, the land of lepers and snake charmers was supplanted by one of tech tycoons and MTV veejays.
Contrary to government claims however, the liberated economy -- commonly portrayed as an antidote to poverty among global financial institutions -- has done little for India's poor, say several leading economists, including Jean Dreze, Martin Ravallion and Raghbendra Jha. The most notable outcome of reforms, they say, has been to make inequality and even wider chasm.
As the number of Indian millionaires grew an estimated seven-fold during the 1990s, the number of hungry Indians actually rose, according to the United Nations' Food and Agricultural Organization.
Decades of underinvestment in human development in India, concluded the United Nations in its 2005 human development report, have yielded a grim set of statistics: half of all children remain malnourished, half of women remain illiterate, more than 80 percent of the countryside lacks access to a telephone or a toilet.
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"In economic life there is extreme inequality and exploitation. Although colonialism no longer exists openly in the political and economic sphere, still it persists indirectly, and this should not be tolerated... In this respect you should remember that in economic life, we will have to guarantee the minimum requirements of life to one and all... There cannot be any sort of adjustment as far as this point is concerned. The minimum purchasing requirement must be guaranteed to all. Today these fundamental essentialities are not being guaranteed. Rather, people are being guided by deceptive economic ideas like outdated Marxism, which has proven ineffective in practical life and has not been successfully implemented in any corner of the world. Why do people still believe in such a theory, which has never been proved successful? The time has come for people to make a proper assessment of whether they are being misguided or not." |
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"Human beings have still not been able to form a human society, and have still not learned to move with the spirit of a pilgrim. Although many small groups, motivated by self-interest, work together in particular situations, not even a small fraction of their work is done with a broader social motive. By strict definition, shall we have to declare that each small family unit is a society in itself? If going ahead in mutual adjustment only out of narrow self-interest or momentary self-seeking is called society, then in such a society, no provision can be made for the disabled, the diseased or the helpless, because in most cases nobody can benefit from them in any way... in that case there always remains the possibility of some people getting isolated from the collective. All human beings must attach themselves to others by the common bond of love and march forward hand in hand; then only will I proclaim it a society." |